Horses of God by Mahi Binebine Read Free Book Online Page A

upside down. She’d been informed of the carnage I, my brother Hamid, and other terrorists had wreaked in the city: the dozens of innocent victims, the massive material damage, the entire country’s panic. Yemma, in the yard, had crumpled over an upturned basin, and took refuge in a strange silence. She merely observed the commotion as if it had nothing to do with her, as if the children who’d just died were not hers. She did not weep, she did not groan. The nest she’d built over so many years, withsuch care, suddenly swept off in a whirlwind, belonged to some other woman. No, it wasn’t her husband, or her remaining children, that the police were unceremoniously marching off in handcuffs. This was a gang of strangers roughing up other strangers, amid sounds of screams and pleading, as often happened in the slum. Nor did she see her neighbors, who came en masse to comfort her. She didn’t hear their siren wails, nor did she feel their repeated, insistent embraces. She watched people and things with the same lethargy that would come over her in the evenings, in front of the television, when she managed to make us watch an Egyptian soap opera. We’d wait for her to doze off before changing the channel; she was always so tired she’d be asleep within five minutes. But she wasn’t sleeping now. Taking advantage of the confusion, she simply stood up and left, not bothering to put on her djellaba, or even her slippers. No one saw her again, until the day of our burial. My brothers searched for her everywhere, mobilizing the entire family. They began with the nearby slums: Chichane, Toma, Douar Lahjar, Douar Scouila; then they went inside the city walls, combing the farthest alleyways of the medina. They hammered on the doors of mosques and holy men, in case she had melted into the magma of beggars. But no, she had vanished. The police were looking for her too, for further questioning. And God knows, every square inch of that city waspatrolled by as many representatives of law and order as the country could possibly muster.
    And now, suddenly, here she was, as if by a miracle. This creature, all in rags, with disheveled hair, walking barefoot along the path overgrown with thistles, staring into space in the middle of the cemetery, was indeed my beloved mother. She had come to say her goodbyes. A hubbub of protest broke out, since women are not admitted to the cemetery on burial days. Yemma paid no attention; she advanced slowly, like a tightrope walker on a wire, one foot in front of the other. She would not falter now that she was so close to her goal. My brothers’ impulse was to rush over to her, but Father stopped them in their tracks. The silence grew even heavier than it had been at any moment of that torrid day in that accursed month of May. The crowd gathered around my grave parted to let her through. Scores of eyes stared at the sickly creature who, as naturally as could be, was defying an immutable tradition. She came right up to the edge, as if she might throw herself in and lie down by my side, as if she might let out the sobs her throat had held back for so long. But she did not. She simply muttered a jumbled verse from the Koran, alone at first, the grave diggers looking on aghast, then accompanied by a blind beggar, whose hoarse voice sent shivers down everyone’s spine. My father too began to chant, then mybrothers, and finally everyone else. The rest of the beggars, who until then had been standing at a distance, now joined the group, breaking into a shrill dirge, the better to earn the dried figs and dates they were expecting. But there was no woman at home to think about alms or funeral customs, or to greet people coming to offer their condolences. That said, there wasn’t exactly a crowd of them, because plainclothes police were constantly on the prowl. Every passerby was a potential terrorist. So people hid indoors and hardly went out. The dump, too, was deserted,